Suggested Leadership Actions

Inspect

• Reflect on your reactions to your team’s mistakes over the past few weeks or months. Would your teams interpret your reaction as decriminalizing mistakes and emphasizing the opportunity to learn from them? Do you model learning from mistakes in your behavior?

• Interview your team members to assess their level of psychological safety. Can they take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

• Perform a gap analysis between your organization and the generative culture in Westrum’s model.

• Review your organization’s approach to assigning workloads to teams. Are you setting expectations based on observed empirical capacity for work?

Adapt

• Make a personal resolution to decriminalize mistakes in your interactions with your teams.

• Communicate to your teams that you expect them to work at a sustainable pace that allows for learning and growth. Ask them to let you know if schedule expectations are preventing that.

• Make a plan to close the gaps identified in your gap analysis of Westrum’s Three Cultures Model.

• Make a plan for how to bring other leaders in your organization along with you on your Agile journey.